Hippo Hunting

I like hippos. I like amigurumi. There should be ample hippo crochet patterns out there, no? No. At least, not realistic hippo crochet patterns. PlanetJune has one, but it’s not quite the shape I have in my head – in particular I like the hippos with their mouths open. Brigitte Read’s Super Super Cute Crochet has a cute open-mouthed hippo in it, but the pattern has errors. It starts at the rear and increases stitches so slowly that you get a hippo with a conical behind; I think there must be rounds missing from the beginning. The head/face pattern does what the photos indicate it should, but my “fix” of the body resulted in a spherical hippo:

Have you ever seen a hippopotamus fly?	Are you my mother?

I have been working off and on for quite some time to design a realistic open-mouthed hippo – with the sort of Chinese spoon shape to the jaws – but this weekend I decided to try for a thumbnail hippo, a tiny little guy. I ended up making two hippos Friday, neither of which is a final draft:

Believe it or not, the large one was supposed to be a thumbnail originally.

The bigger one has a better face shape, and just needs reproportioning to be something I would be happy showing to the world. The small one looks rather like a pig, and I plan to adapt the pattern both into a proper pig and into a proper hippo – and then make it in embroidery floss so it’s even smaller. I am extremely happy with how well my freehanding went in both cases, however.

They are on rocks because they are both chin-heavy.

Saturday I tried again with the wee one, and it came out better. I’m not sure I’m ready to call it final, but I think this time around someone looking at it would successfully guess it’s a hippo!

This time the rocks are in his body.